WarioWare: Get It Together trades direct control for unique characters

WarioWare: Get it together! is a starting point for the full-length series. It’s still a game loaded with weird and fun microgames, smaller minigames with simple goals that last about 10 seconds or less, but the way the players interact is completely different. Over the years, players have used buttons or touch controls to pluck nose hairs, joust, or prevent arrows from falling. But WarioWare: Get it! sees players control one of Wario’s crew members and manipulate the game environment through that avatar.

Get it! removes direct control of the series from players and adds a middleman. Each one of Get it!The characters have a unique play style. Some can fly, some can’t stop moving, and some can’t even move.

This is a different breed from WarioWare, one where character choice could be everything.

How WarioWare: Get it together! job?

Nintendo gave me a hands-free demo to WarioWare: Get it together! earlier this week. Our preview showed the game and its various modes with two-player multiplayer, but many game modes, such as story, also allow solo play.

I watched as two players jumped directly to WarioWare: Get it together!The story mode, which should work in a similar way to the WarioWare variety packs that players remember. The duo jumped into what they called a “fantasy pack,” which included a random assortment of fantasy-inspired microgames.

Both players selected their characters, Dribble and Spitz, the cat and dog combo that works at WarioWare Inc., and threw themselves into the games. Dribble and Spitz worked together to solve each microgame that WarioWare: Get it together! spit on them. The better they did, the faster subsequent games sped up.

So far this should sound familiar to most WarioWare gamers. But the selection of Dribble and Spitz fundamentally changed the experience. In WarioWare: Get it together! Dribble and Spitz travel in small buggy cars that fly through the air and fire bullets. They are characters created for cooperative and designed to go together; one of your cars always looks to the right and the other to the left. Due to their blocked directions, that meant that sometimes the player facing left couldn’t do anything to solve a microgame, while other times it was essential to clear a game quickly.

Other game modes we saw offered similar reveals. A longer microgame, Daily Grind, is just a scrolling screen where players must work together to collect contracts and get to the other side. Players get points for finding power-ups that change their character as a player, quickly turning the whole process into chaos. Some characters, such as 9-Volt, skateboard constantly, so the controlling player must be careful not to roll towards enemies. Other characters, like the 18-volt one, cannot move on their own at all and need to band together to pull strings in environments using projectiles. Daily Grind is a simple, repetitive game, but those characters will have fundamentally different experiences playing it.

As we jump between each game mode, WarioWare: Get it together!The character-based philosophy affected every part of the experience.

How do the WarioWare characters influence the formula?

The idea of ​​a drastic change like this probably has some old-school WarioWare fans squirming in their seats. But each of WarioWare: Get it together!Microgames are built with the roster in mind. Some microgames may be easier for some characters and more difficult for others, but all characters can complete all games, Nintendo said.

The switch to character-specific gameplay promises to change the mindset with which players enter new microgames, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Going back to the old WarioWare games, it’s not always clear how you need to interact with a microgame until you’ve already lost it. Therefore, success can feel like memorization, knowing that you have to press a specific button to get the horse moving, rather than waiting for it to start naturally.

WarioWare: Get it together!The characters might hurt the great diversity of microgames, but they should also reduce confusion. Each character has the same controls for each microgame, even if they interact with them differently. Players will need to learn the ins and outs of each character to master their playstyle, but they should be easier to handle in microgames than they’ve ever seen before.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of WarioWare: Get it together!Character selection is for veterans and players who really want to improve their skill. Towards the end of our preview, the two Nintendo representatives selected a specific Play-O-Pedia microgame, a collection of all the microgames that players have unlocked and that is repeated over and over again for fun, high score or practice.

The duo selected a microgame that was about escaping from an underground enclosure and into a helicopter, with each player needing to press a button to let the other out. It’s a microgame set in tight spaces and requires precision to be successful. But the folks at Nintendo selected a couple of ninja characters named Kat and Ana, who come with a very specific quirk – they’re always jumping.

Every run of the microgame was chaos. Both players were bouncing wherever they went, hitting their heads on the ceiling or missing the starting gate for half a second. But the two found a rhythm and finished the microgame more than a dozen times. Once they finally ran out of lives WarioWare: Get it together! gave them their highest specific Kat and Ana score for that microgame.

The experience of setting your own goal and overshadowing it through sheer chaos feels authentic to WarioWare, even through all the specific character differences. The change can be scary, especially for such a beloved series that has been around since the Game Boy Advance. But Nintendo keeps the series’ chaotic roots intact while trying something new.

Nintendo recently released an eShop demo for gamers to Get it!changes for themselves. Will be officially launched WarioWare: Get it together! on September 10, exclusively for Nintendo Switch.